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EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS

About Garden of Six Seasons

Para Site is proud to present Garden of Six Seasons. One of the starting points of the exhibition are the image- and object-making lineages that transversed or unfolded in parallel to the fractures of the modern. Garden of Six Seasons discusses appropriate frameworks of understanding and bringing together these multiple aesthetic and cosmological lineages active today, from paubha painting in Nepal, to ink in East Asia, and barkcloth in the Pacific, as well as to other languages marginalised by a Eurocentric canon. But the exhibition also looks beyond the dominant traditions in these contexts, to showcase materiality and media from communities which have often been subjected to processes of internal colonisation by their own, often post-colonial, states and their official cultural narratives. These explorations of vocabularies of representation also include a genealogy of map-making, from the depiction of the whole universe to the inner human body (sometimes in the same map), instruments for navigating the Earth and healing the body. Garden of Six Seasons is also crucially interested in indigenous knowledge that is active and subversive, working towards the upending of patriarchal structures and dominant national frameworks, creating a new global solidarity of places and communities of resistance.

The exhibition is named after an English-style garden built by the Nepalese King a hundred years ago in Kathmandu, one of many steps in the country’s largely unacknowledged process of colonisation. Its name evokes the six seasons traditionally observed in Kathmandu Valley, a source of great agricultural abundance and of political power for the many successive rulers based there, before climate change rendered obsolete the distinction among the six separate seasons. The title is also a metaphor for the microcosms revealed in the exhibition, as gardens have often played the role of mapping visions of the world, at various scales. Humans have been creating artificial environments ever since they started making objects, either in the process of economically exploiting and dislocating nature or through the sophisticated manipulation of garden design. Both of these practices have always been culturally specific, similar to other art forms and cultural practices. Currently, the alteration of the Earth has passed a threshold where man-made landscapes seem to be the planet’s default state. While the language of ethnography and colonial-type museums, where objects and forms from different contexts have been amassed and described, attempted until recently to describe the perimeter of cultures, some cultural forms remained more elusive to this exercise. Gardens are one of these complicated objects and some of the most untranslatable cultural artefacts, their dependence on local climate making them difficult to move, displace and isolate, and their replication even more imprecise than that of other cultural forms. Botanical gardens in colonial centres were more preoccupied with relocating seeds and maximising their economic potential in their new location than with the plants’ complex position and meaning in their original context and chinoiserie gardens throughout Europe were a case in point for the difficulty of replicating garden culture. As the future is marked by our ability to negotiate—in different cultural codes—our common ownership of the global environment, under the growing perspective of both a climate and a political catastrophe, understanding how humans have been shaping their land and landscape will be essential.

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Para Site is offering medical and dental insurance coverage for Hong Kong artists in the exhibition, generously made possible by the following supporters: H.G. Masters, Katie De Tilly, Dave Chapman, Chantal Wong, and Yuk King Tan.

Para Site Art Space is financially supported by the Art Development Matching Grants Scheme of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. The content of these activities does not reflect the views of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.